Art & Statues
The Art Deco Style by Theodore Menten
The Art Deco Style by Theodore Menten
Published by Dover in 1972, this softcover reference gathers 468 authentic examples of Art Deco design drawn from household objects, architecture, sculpture, graphics, and jewelry. Selected by Theodore Menten, the images come largely from the period portfolio L'Art International d'Aujourd'hui and span gardens, dwellings, interiors, furniture, fabrics, stained glass, sculpture, and jewelry. The cover brings together several of these categories at once, showing a Le Corbusier armchair, a sculptural staircase, a Lucite tabletop sculpture, and a pair of jewelry details in silhouette against a black background with orange and blue accents. Work by more than 170 artists, architects, and designers appears throughout, including Edgar Brandt, Pierre Chareau, Georges Fouquet, and Louis Vuitton. As part of the Dover Architecture series, the book was designed as an accessible visual survey rather than a narrative history, making it a practical tool for identifying period motifs and forms.
The photographs inside are organized by category rather than chronology, moving from Art Deco gardens and terraces through dwellings, including the Bauhaus faculty residences designed by Walter Gropius, and on to interiors, furniture, fabrics, and decorative objects. Chairs by Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, and other modernist designers appear alongside more purely decorative pieces, giving a sense of how far the style extended across daily life in the 1920s and 1930s. The variety on display makes the book useful for spotting the geometric and prismatic vocabulary that defined the period across very different types of objects.
Theodore Menten worked as an editor and author on numerous design and pattern reference books during the 1970s, often drawing on historical portfolios and periodicals to bring period source material back into print. His approach here reflects that background, presenting archival photographs with minimal text so the images themselves carry the book. Dover Publications, known for producing affordable reprints of design and pattern references, made this kind of visual survey widely accessible to designers, collectors, and researchers who might not otherwise have access to the original portfolios.
This book remains a practical resource for collectors and dealers who need to identify Art Deco forms and motifs across a wide range of media, and its concise format makes it easy to reference quickly. It also holds appeal simply as a browsing volume for its striking black and white photography.
